Process Post – Week 7

This week’s lecture has been about digital literacy and critical thinking, which in my opinion is very interesting and important. As our society is so influenced by digital media, there are different things to consider and notice when being online.

Today, we focused on fake news. I was presented to three different types of it; misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. Putting these in relation to blogging, it is definitely something that one should look out for. When people write blogs, they often write from their own point of view, and therefore it is necessary to be critical when reading it. But the thing is, we are all biased, making it difficult to be objective and critical. In my own blog, I write about my experiences and is very subjective. Therefore, I do not consider it to be neither misinformation or disinformation, but someone might have another opinion. 

Biases are also something we talked about in class today. We got introduced to three different biases, of which I found very interesting. First is the digital amnesia, also know as the Google effect, which refers to the fact that we tend to forget information as soon as we get it. Our subconsciousness are aware that we are probably able to get the information again, and therefore we are not forced to remember it the first time. Next is the Ikea effect, which is about that we assign a higher value to things we have contributed to create. For me, I see this in relation to school. Things I have written assignments about or worked with, tends to be more interesting than the ones I have not. Last is the automation bias, which is about that algorithms and AI does the work for us. We only see a selected number of sources, and because of that, it gets hard for us to look at beyond what is offered to us. I can relate to this, when researching for my blog, as I tend to go with the first and the best, because I somewhat have faith to whatever I am exposed to. I am aware of the fact that I need to be more critical of the sources! Sometimes it just goes a little too fast… It is just important to ask ‘why’, and who ‘they’ are, in modeling digital literacy.